The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  As it turned out, Dylan’s marriage did not end the summer he wrote Blood on the Tracks. In 1975, he and his wife were together intermittently. In the spring he jetted off to France and she didn’t go. According to his host, Dylan called her every day. In the meantime he drank and messed around with French women. He recorded another album, ending it with an ode to his muse; he even titled it “Sara.” That fall, Dylan put together a circus of a tour, a ramshackle affair during which the musicians filmed an avant-garde movie, and Sara went along. But in 1976, their relationship took a turn for the worse, and in Fort Collins, Colorado, he sang a blistering “Idiot Wind” while she watched. In 1977, they were divorced. The following year, Street-Legal appeared. On the cover, a tan line replaced the wedding ring.

  It was a cult favorite. The last song in particular affected fans as much as anything on Blood on the Tracks. “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)” dealt with the same dramas Dylan had wrestled with on the farm in the summer of 1974. His love was gone, and this time it really was for good. He had made it through the dark days and he was still alive. He was a man. He would survive. So why couldn’t he get her out of his head?

  Some years later, in a bedroom in St. Cloud, Minnesota, a Dylan fan was suffering his first heartbreak. It had been a teenage romance. There had been others, but until now he’d always done the breaking up. She was older and had gone off to college, and he felt left behind and forgotten. Obliterated. So Lucas Stensland pushed the repeat button on his CD player, sat on the floor in his closet, slid the doors shut, and hid out while “Where Are You Tonight?” played over and over and over again.

  The song captured his hurt and alienation so perfectly, with such honesty and beauty. Lucas felt a kinship with Dylan. He didn’t know anybody who could give him more than pat advice when he just wanted somebody to understand the turmoil he felt. But the song understood. It was the cry of a man who had wrecked his life but now was getting himself back together. It made Lucas realize that the world wouldn’t take care of him; he had to do it himself. The ending crushed him, like a great wave arriving at intervals of six minutes and fifteen seconds. “But without you it just doesn’t seem right. Where are you tonight?”

  Lucas thought that it could be the anthem for every broken person in the world.

  2

  Lucas’s father told him there was no God. His son had to think he would know, because he taught the course on death and dying at St. Cloud State University. He kept a collection of coffins at the school. His son called them “dead suitcases” when he was very young; the baby coffin freaked him out quite a bit. Sometimes his father would hide inside a coffin as the starting time of the scheduled class came and went. The students would get impatient and ask each other whether they had the wrong day or wrong time or wrong classroom. And then, just as they began to walk out, he would rise, very slowly, from the coffin. He brought his profession home with him, too. He ran a nonprofit to protect relatives of the recently departed from being fleeced by funeral homes, so the family had two phone lines at home, a personal line and a nonprofit line. When the second phone rang, they all knew some stranger had died.

  Lucas was a depressed high schooler, and he knows that it sounds silly, but when he’d think about killing himself—not for real, just in that adolescent way of thinking heavy thoughts to make himself feel important—he racked his brain to come up with one good reason not to do it. The reason wasn’t God, of course. It wasn’t because he looked forward to college or a job or life after he got out of St. Cloud. It was this simple: He was a Dylan fan, and he wanted to hear the next record.

  As he turned thirty in 2006, he found himself working as an analyst at a New York City law firm by day and writing novels at night. He had a hangdog face and was prematurely bald, but he was smart and snarky and living the city life in America’s hipster capital, Brooklyn. Sometimes he grew a mustache that seemed ironic. He started going to a Dylan fan meet-up with an eclectic bunch of fans, among them a former go-go dancer turned Messianic Jew, a writer/model, a musician, an English professor. One of them was Nina Goss, the Hibbing pilgrim who was then in the nascent stages of her own obsession. Lucas and Nina became fast friends. She demanded a level of seriousness from her Dylan acquaintances, and Lucas knew what he was talking about. It was not just dates and details, though he had those firmly in hand. If, say, Dylan’s Shot of Love came up for discussion, he could tell you that it was released not in 1980 but 1981, and, by the way, it featured sidemen from both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. But he also had insights about the songs and the man, and he took Dylan as seriously as Nina did. In no time, she became Lucas’s closest Dylan friend. He helped her launch the Dylan journal. There was a time when they spoke or e-mailed every day.

  Then, in 2010, Lucas’s life unspooled. He had married his girlfriend the summer before, and by spring it was over. He had no sooner ended things than he left New York and moved back to his sleepy hometown of St. Cloud. A new relationship bloomed, then withered. He fell into a deep depression. He had been diagnosed with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder years earlier; therapy and pharmaceuticals helped keep his brain in check. But back in his hometown, alone, he stopped taking the drugs and started medicating himself with heavy doses of alcohol. He couldn’t sit still. He was frightened of what was happening to him. It was then, at this the lowest of lows, that Dylan’s music stepped in to save him.

  He had always carried lyrics around in his head like refrains. In therapy, he learned techniques for coping with problems. But Dylan songs helped in different ways. They illuminated how he was feeling. Lucas could play some song and find that it said exactly how he felt at that moment. Lucas would listen to Dylan with girlfriends. Songs would grow into their songs. With one girl it was a track Dylan recorded during his time with Sara, “Never Say Goodbye.” (“You’re beautiful beyond words, you’re beautiful to me . . .”) When the wounds were still open, Lucas would torture himself by listening to that song. That one and “Simple Twist of Fate,” the Blood on the Tracks classic about a lover who disappears. The last happy night he had with this woman, she had given him a slip from a fortune cookie that read FATE WILL FIND A WAY.

  Although he was living in St. Cloud, he was still telecommuting for the New York law firm. But he decided it would be too depressing to actually sleep in his place in his old hometown. So just about every day, he was driving back and forth to his brother’s in Minneapolis, an hour south on Interstate 94.

  On the road one night in a brand-new Volkswagen, he had a panic attack. He could barely breathe. When he lost it like this, he would think, Oh, my God, I can’t move my right arm, and even though there was nothing physically wrong with his right arm, just thinking it would make it so. He knew he should pull over. Questions flitted through his mind. What am I doing? Why am I in Minnesota? Why do I fucking own a Jetta?

  The car had a six-disc changer, and he started manically flipping through them. Merle Haggard, nooooo. Guy Clark, not now. Dylan—incredible. It was Saved.

  When Dylan’s marriage fell apart in 1977, he soon found a new obsession. In November 1978, toward the end of a year-long world tour, somebody tossed a silver cross onto the stage in San Diego, and Dylan picked it up. Two nights later he played Tucson, Arizona, and in his hotel room the singer felt a supernatural force. “Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble.” He started wearing the cross onstage, and close listeners noticed a new twist when he sang “Tangled Up in Blue” from Blood on the Tracks. On the record, he goes home with a stripper and she reads to him from a book of Italian poetry. Toward the end of 1978, the stripper and the singer are reading from the Holy Bible.

  Two of his bandmates were members of a California congregation, the Vineyard Fellowship, as was his new girlfriend, actress Mary Alice Artes. After the tour ended, she spoke to the pastor about Dylan, and he sent over two men to talk with Dylan. He started
going to Bible classes, four mornings a week for three months in an office building in Reseda, California. The anarchist who had warned against taking orders from anybody had found a leader. In 1979, a new record appeared, Slow Train Coming, with a pickax on the cover shaped like a cross.

  Saved was Dylan’s next release. It was straight gospel. He had been touched and healed and delivered by Jesus’ crucifixion. He had a covenant with God. The Messiah was his rock. No longer would Dylan be held back by bad habits and old temptations; he had a higher calling. Everyone did. “Shake the dust off your feet,” he sang, “don’t look back.”

  The closest Lucas Stensland ever got to religion was when he was a teen and he went to church to rebel against his parents. “I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body,” he says. But that night on the highway, Saved captivated him. Listening intently, he began to breathe again. And he had a revelation. It wasn’t the same as Dylan’s. He wasn’t ready to follow Jesus. It was this: Bob Dylan went through a divorce and years of turmoil, and he survived it. He discovered something that had meaning for him, and so could Lucas. “It was like therapy. I took advice from him—a cue.”

  He was not going to make his happiness dependent on someone else. He was going to stand for himself. He would save himself.

  He pulled himself together. He got back on his medication and moved into an apartment in a bustling section of downtown Minneapolis. He started writing haiku, a bit obsessively to be honest. He’d carry a notebook around with him and jot down poems by the dozen. He went to haiku meet-ups and met haiku people and got his verses published.

  The pain of his divorce was still raw. There was another Dylan song, “Standing in the Doorway,” from 1997, that would run in his head, picking at his feelings, demanding that he listen. He had to listen. He had no choice. Maybe that was how he would get it out of his system. The singer wanders through a night alone. It’s summer. Everybody’s laughing and it’s bringing him down. He dances with a woman but thinks of his true love. When he sings at the end, “You left me standing in the doorway cryin’,” Lucas could almost see Dylan at the microphone, his knees buckling from the agony of the line. This was no performance. Dylan was feeling it.

  A year after Lucas’s marriage fell apart, he wondered if leaving his wife so impulsively had been a mistake. Had he bolted instead of taking time to think it through? “Standing in the Doorway” seemed to be the cry of someone who had betrayed himself, and Lucas could relate. He found strange comfort in the singer’s torment, just as he had as a teenager listening to “Where Are You Tonight?”

  “I can’t lie and say I’m not a lost person. Obviously I’m a lost person,” he says. “I wish I could turn to God like he did.”

  3

  In 1979 and 1980, Dylan concerts took on the air of tent-show revivals. The performances were not for the weak-hearted. These were end-times songs. Jesus was coming, soon, and he would separate the righteous from the wicked. This new message would not surprise anybody at the Vineyard Fellowship. They studied Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. Lindsey argued that the events of the day—­Israel’s rise, nuclear weapons, natural catastrophes—had been foretold in the Bible and presaged the apocalypse. But for the old fans watching Dylan’s first Christian concerts in November 1979 at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, the new message was bewildering. That first night, some of them were frustrated to the point of crying. A clutch of them surrounded the promoter in the lobby and berated him. You’ve got to do something. As Dylan and his backing singers left in a van, they were beset by concertgoers. One faction yelled, Bob, why are you doing this? Others hollered benedictions: God bless you!

  Dylan’s conversion tested the staying power of his fans. To the nonbelievers, skeptics, and intellectuals among Dylan’s base—they were no small percentage of it—their hero was too smart to fall for evangelical Christianity. Jewish fans felt scorned. One thought it smacked of cult brainwashing. When it came out that his girlfriend had helped usher him into Christianity, the secular fans prayed that this conversion was just a phase.

  Music writer Paul Williams saw a number of the Warfield shows, and he quickly dashed off a slim but open-minded volume called Dylan—What Happened? He counted himself among the disciples who appreciated Dylan’s music by identifying “100% with most everything he says and feels.” He hypothesized that Dylan wanted to unload his flock on someone else, somebody who could carry them. “If you don’t want to be the messiah, and people keep treating you like one anyway, it makes sense to hook up with somebody who’s willing to accept that karma,” he wrote. “ ‘No, I ain’t the messiah, but let me introduce you to my Friend . . . ’” Williams understood the betrayal fans felt. Before, they all felt like they were on his side when he pointed fingers at those who didn’t get it. They had all sung along to 1965’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” (“Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.”) Now he was pointing at them.

  Dylan started preaching from the stage, and in Tempe, Arizona, a month into the tour, he met a hostile crowd. People had been walking out at earlier shows. These fans were jeering and shouting. “Well,” he said from the stage. “What a rude bunch tonight, huh? You all know how to be real rude. You know about the spirit of the Antichrist? Does anybody here know about that? Well, it’s clear the Antichrist is loose right now.”

  He tried to tell a story. The crowd interrupted with shouts of “Rock ’n’ roll!” He stopped.

  “You wanna rock ’n’ roll,” he responded, “you can go down and rock ’n’ roll. You can go see Kiss and you rock ’n’ roll all your way down to the pit.”

  He explained that there were two kinds of people in the world. “Don’t matter how much money you got,” he said, “there’s only two kinds of people. There are saved people and there’s lost people. Yeah. Now, remember that I told you that. You may never see me again. I may not be through here again. You may not see me. Sometime down the line you’ll remember you heard it here: that Jesus is Lord and every knee shall bow to him.”

  One follower wrote, “Perhaps we’re lucky he’s only claimed he’s found Jesus; it wouldn’t be totally surprising if he claimed he was Jesus.”

  Six months into this, the tour rolled through the northeast. Peter Stone Brown—the Dylanhead raised by ultraliberal Jews in Philadelphia—caught the act in Hartford, Connecticut. Fifteen years earlier he’d been at the scene of that near-riotous electric show at Forest Hills. He’d left unbothered back then. This time, at the end of the show, he walked out seriously angry at the man onstage.

  Looking back, he couldn’t say he was surprised by Dylan’s conversion. He had almost been expecting it. Asked what his songs were about during those ridiculous press conferences in 1966, he said, “They’re all about the Second Coming.” Everybody laughed. But the next year, after Dylan recovered from the motorcycle wreck, he released a record, John Wesley Harding, that was crammed with scripture. Its most famous cut was “All Along the Watchtower,” an ominous dialogue on the cusp of Armageddon. “The hour is getting late,” a thief tells a joker in that song. Like artists throughout history—painters, authors, singers—Dylan had long mined the Bible for phrases, stories, and images. “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” from 1963, recalled the Great Flood with its rising waters: “You better start swimmin’ . . .” He used the scriptures in subversive ways. A jive-talking Abraham appears on “Highway 61 Revisited.” (“Man,” Abe says to God, “you must be puttin’ me on.”) “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window,” a love-triangle song, has been interpreted as a hipster recapitulation of the Bible story of kings Saul and David.

  After Dylan’s conversion, Peter sat down and read the Bible start to finish. “I just figured, well, let’s see what this is about,” he said. “I started at the beginning and read the whole thing.” He was not looking to be converted, and he wasn’t. He treated it as a sort of academic exercise. What blew h
is mind was when he reached Leviticus, chapter twenty-six, in which God is speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai. Peter found several lines that unlocked for him the confounding John Wesley Harding song “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” from 1967—a full decade before the conversion. In the course of demanding obedience, God threatened his chosen people with utter destruction. Several curses mirrored those in Dylan’s song: “I will make your heaven as iron”; “your strength shall be spent in vain”; “ye shall eat and not be satisfied.” Whoever survived this holocaust would be scattered into enemy lands. In other words, they would be immigrants. Suddenly the song made sense. It was a lament for the wicked who turn their backs on God.

  Peter didn’t necessarily have a problem with Dylan finding Christ. As he pointed out, some of Dylan’s great musical heroes—Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis—“had this Christ thing going on.” Peter liked Slow Train enough that when he found a bunch of copies in the discount bins, he bought them for his friends. His Jewish friends. He was not being ironic. “The singing on it is incredible!”

  What did bother him in Connecticut was the right-wing political diatribe that Dylan spewed from the stage. Dylan started preaching about the Canaanites, and how God pronounced in the book of Genesis that Judgment Day would come for them someday, but “their iniquity is not yet full.” Centuries later, the scripture says, God ordered his chosen people to slaughter the wicked Canaanites one and all. On the stage in Hartford, Dylan—erstwhile friend of beat poet Allen Ginsberg—linked the Canaanites with gays. “San Francisco is kind of a unique town these days,” Dylan said. “I think it’s either one third or two thirds of the population there are homosexuals. All right! I guess they’re working up to a hundred percent, I don’t know. Anyway . . . I guess the iniquity’s not yet full. And I don’t wanna be around when it is!”